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“It seems incredible, but interactive and communicative art in Russia is practiced only by Chernyshev, Shulgin and Efimov, working together or individually” says curator and gallerist Elena Selina. “Recently, interest in new media art has increased in Moscow. Not only professionals, but also collectors and the public, have overcome inner barriers that prevented (their acceptance) of the new media language”.

Presented by the Moscow Department of Culture, Russian Acacademy of Arts, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art with XL Gallery, the CRITI-POP exhibition showcases three artists, two creative groups, forty works and plenty of themes including information overflow, reconstruction of identity, genetic pop-engineering, the poetry of stock-exchange deals and news broadcasts, aesthetics of data transmission and science art.

Interactive installations by Vladislav Efimov and Aristarkh Chernyshev, who worked together from 1996 to 2005, bring us art that deals with genetic engineering, statistical modeling of processes, computer games and robotics. The viewer becomes a hero of the work — a colleague of an insane scientist modeling DNA, a creator of 3-D avatars, a conqueror of robots or a terminator hunting for artists.

Electroboutique (Aristarkh Chernyshev and Alexei Shulgin since 2003) is a unique art group that unites artists, developers of electronics, programmers and designers. Using techniques taken from social psychology and perception theory, the artists transmit their critical message directly into the unconscious of the viewers and entertain them with bright colors and garish forms. In his solo projects, Aristarkh Chernyshev creates art from information streams like TV-channels, Internet-news or stock-exchange tapes while the solo work of Alexei Shulgin looks at our addiction to technologies and gives variants of creative rescue. One of the historic exhibits is a legendary rock band 386 DX, made of an outdated computer playing ever-young hits of British-American and Russian rock.